Intelligent
Design

Dec. 20: A federal judge dealt a harsh blow to a
Pennsylvania school board's efforts to offer
intelligent design in biology class. NBCs
Robert Bazell reports.

Plaintiffs Tammy Kitzmiller and Christy Rehm express
their happiness during a news conference on the
intelligent-design court ruling in Harrisburg, Pa. Both
women have children in the Dover Area School District.

Of 64,448 votes, oat 8:50 pm Dec 20, 2005, the Question
was Do you agree with the judge's ruling in the Pennsylvania
intelligent design case? 66% said yes. 34% said no.

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In one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and
evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a federal
judge barred a Pennsylvania public school district Tuesday
from teaching intelligent design in biology
class, saying the concept is creationism in disguise.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones delivered a stinging
attack on the Dover Area School Board, saying its
first-in-the-nation decision in October 2004 to insert
intelligent design into the science curriculum violates the
constitutional separation of church and state.

The ruling was a major setback to the intelligent design
movement, which is also waging battles in Georgia and
Kansas. Intelligent design holds that living organisms are
so complex that they must have been created by some kind of
higher force.

Jones decried the breathtaking inanity of the
Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to
conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote
religion.

A six-week trial over the issue yielded
overwhelming evidence establishing that
intelligent design is a religious view, a mere
re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific
theory, said Jones, a Republican and a churchgoer
appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

The school system said it will probably not appeal the
ruling, because the members who backed intelligent design
were ousted in Novembers elections and replaced with a
new slate opposed to the policy.

During the trial, the board argued that it was trying
improve science education by exposing students to
alternatives to Charles Darwins theory of evolution
and natural selection.

The policy required students to hear a statement about
intelligent design before ninth-grade lessons on evolution.
The statement said Darwins theory is not a
fact and has inexplicable gaps. It
referred students to an intelligent-design textbook,
Of Pandas and People.

But the judge said: We find that the secular
purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the
boards real purpose, which was to promote religion in
the public school classroom.

The disclaimer, he said, "singles out the theory of
evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in
the scientific community, causes students to doubt its
validity without scientific justification, presents students
with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific
theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though
it were a science resource and instructs students to forgo
scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and
instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere."

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot
require public schools to balance evolution lessons by
teaching creationism.

Eric Rothschild, an attorney for the families who
challenged the policy, called the ruling a real
vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up
and say there was something wrong in their school
district.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the
Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which
represented the school district and describes its mission as
defending the religious freedom of Christians, said:
What this really looks like is an ad hominem attack on
scientists who happen to believe in God.

It was the latest chapter in a debate over the teaching
of evolution dating back to the Scopes trial, in which
Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for
violating a state law against teaching evolution.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Georgia
heard arguments over whether a suburban Atlanta school
district had the right to put stickers on biology textbooks
describing evolution as a theory, not fact. A federal judge
last January ordered the stickers removed.

In November, state education officials in Kansas adopted
new classroom science standards that call the theory of
evolution into question.

President Bush also weighed in on the issue of
intelligent design recently, saying schools should present
the concept when teaching about the origins of life.

ID is not science

In his ruling, Jones said that while intelligent design,
or ID, arguments may be true, a proposition on which
the court takes no position, ID is not science. Among
other things, he said intelligent design violates the
centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and
permitting supernatural causation; it relies on
flawed and illogical arguments; and its attacks
on evolution have been refuted by the scientific
community.

The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover
Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into
this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of
monetary and personal resources, he wrote.

Jones wrote that he wasnt saying the intelligent
design concept shouldnt be studied and discussed,
saying its advocates have bona fide and deeply held
beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors.

But, he wrote, our conclusion today is that it is
unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution
in a public school science classroom.

The judge also said: It is ironic that several of
these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their
religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to
cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the
ID Policy.

Former school board member William Buckingham, who
advanced the policy, said from his new home in Mount Airy,
N.C., that he still feels the board did the right thing.

We were robbed

Im still waiting for a judge or anyone to
show me anywhere in the Constitution where theres a
separation of church and state, he said. We
didnt lose; we were robbed.

The controversy divided Dover and surrounding Dover
Township, a rural area of nearly 20,000 residents about 20
miles south of Harrisburg. It galvanized voters to oust
eight school board members who supported the policy in the
Nov. 8 school board election. The ninth board member was not
up for re-election.

The new school board president, Bernadette Reinking, said
the board intends to remove intelligent design from the
science curriculum and place it in an elective social
studies class.

As far as I can tell you, there is no intent to
appeal, she said.

The old board's actions may still have an impact,
however. Jones also ruled that the school board would have
to pay the plaintiffs legal fees, which are not
insignificant. Plaintiffs' attorney Rothschild said
compensation would be sought despite the turnover on the
board, but that the cost was still being tallied.
Well sort out who we might pursue for this
remedy in the days ahead, he said.

Judge rules against intelligent design
What's next for the evolution debate Readers react to
intelligent-design ruling Scientists find a
sweet tooth in the brain Ground frozen
since Ice Age thaws More than H2O in tap water
Original cloning claim drawing scrutiny Mammoth DNA
could spark resurrection When humans and chimps
split Cosmic Log: Galaxys center in focus
Science Section Front

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Mainstream science groups hailed Tuesday's
"intelligent-design" ruling as a slam-dunk for evolution.
The judge in the case took extra pains to lay out a legal
view of science vs. religion, saying he hoped it would head
off the "obvious waste of judicial and other resources" on
yet another court challenge.

But even Darwin's staunchest defenders acknowledge that
the legal battle over intelligent design, or ID, is shifting
to new grounds. ID's proponents are already reshaping their
arguments as a case of academic freedom vs. an overreaching
"activist federal judge."

"Let no one think this debate is over. If there's any
lesson to be learned, it's that this debate is never over,"
said Casey Luskin, an attorney at the Seattle-based
Discovery Institute, which came in for criticism in the
ruling from U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III.

Jones' ruling was a sweeping indictment of intelligent
design, the notion that life on Earth was produced by an
unnamed intelligent cause. The defenders of evolutionary
theory gushed over the opinion during a celebratory news
conference in Harrisburg, Pa.

"This decision is a major victory for science, and a
major victory for science education," Eugenie Scott,
executive director of the California-based National Center
for Science Education, told reporters.

The judge could have issued a much narrower opinion,
finding merely that the Dover Area School Board in
Pennsylvania acted with a religious purpose when it required
biology teachers to refer to intelligent design.

While that was indeed part of the ruling, much more of
the 139-page opinion was devoted to the proposition that
intelligent design was repackaged creationism rather than
science. At times, Jones sounded more like a biology
professor than a judge  for example, when he countered
the view that some biological mechanisms were irreducibly
complex by referring to "exaptation," the idea that a
mechanism that was developed for one purpose could be
adapted to another.

Throughout, he rejected the idea that intelligent design
should be used to fill in blank spots in current
evolutionary theory:

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect.
However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render
an explanation on every point should not be used as a
pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis
grounded in religion into the science classroom or to
misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."

Activist judge anticipates criticism

Jones' efforts rankled intelligent-design proponents at
least as much as it pleased Darwin's defenders.

"In my opinion, this decision is unconstitutional,"
Luskin told MSNBC.com in a telephone interview. "The
government has no business telling people how they should
perceive evolution and religion."

A statement from John West, associate director of the
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, struck
a similar tone: "The Dover decision is an attempt by an
activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific
idea and even to prevent criticism of Darwinian evolution
through government-imposed censorship rather than open
debate, and it won't work."

The judge anticipated such criticism in his opinion:

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it
as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have
erred as this is manisfestly not an activist court. Rather,
this case came to us as the result of the activism of an
ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national
public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test
case on ID, who in combination drove the board to adopt an
imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The
breathtaking inanity of the board's decision is evident when
considered against the factual backdrop which has now been
fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents,
and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved
better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with
its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal
resources."

Richard Thompson of the Michigan-based Thomas More Law
Center, the "public interest law firm" cited in Jones'
opinion, made clear that he didn't consider the debate to be
a waste.

"This should be done in the scientific community,
debating it out. ... The debate is still going on. It's a
new debate," Thompson said on MSNBC-TV.

Future frontiers for the ID debate

The judge's opinion isn't likely to set the terms of the
debate in formal terms, due to two factors: It currently
serves as judicial precedent only for the federal district
of central Pennsylvania; and since Dover's pro-ID school
board members were voted out last month, there's virtually
no chance of appeal to a higher court.

But the attorneys for the families who brought the suit
said school board members across the country would do well
to read the opinion closely anyway. "It is our hope that
today's decision will slow other school districts who might
be thinking about moving forward" with ID-friendly policies,
said Witold Walczak, legal director for the American Civil
Liberties Union in Pennsylvania.

Eric Rothschild, another member of the plaintiffs' legal
team, noted that through the years, the legal challenges to
evolution education have been mounted in the name of
creationism, then creation science, then intelligent design.
"We expect another change in labels," he said, "whether it's
'sudden appearance,' or this 'teach the controversy'
thing."

With the Dover case done, the political spotlight is now
likely to shift to Georgia, where a suburban Atlanta school
district is challenging a federal ban on textbook stickers
questioning evolution; and Kansas, where the state school
board recently endorsed ID-friendly curriculum
standards.

But new legal frontiers could well open up in the months
to come.

Luskin told MSNBC.com that the Discovery Institute would
prefer to focus in the future on public-school teachers who
want to bring up intelligent design, rather than on school
districts who want to force intelligent design into the
science curriculum. In fact, the institute has tried to
distance itself from the Dover case for that reason.

"Discovery's policy has always been that we don't think
intelligent design should be mandated. We've always opposed
what the Dover school district did," Luskin said. "We do
think intelligent design should be preserved as a
constitutional right. I don't think this decision is going
to stop teachers outside the Central District of
Pennsylvania from teaching intelligent design."

In his written statement, West said "the institute
strongly supports the freedom of teachers to discuss
intelligent design in an objective manner on a voluntary
basis."

Looking toward Michigan

One case has already attracted some attention: the case
of Michigan's Gull Lake Community Schools, where two
teachers are thinking about filing a lawsuit alleging that
the district is interfering with their right to refer to
intelligent design.

Past judicial opinions have made clear that there are
limits to a teacher's free-speech rights in public schools,
particularly if the teacher appears to advocate a particular
religious view. Scott said Tuesday's court ruling in
Kitzmiller v. Dover only reinforced those limits.

"I think it would be exceedingly unwise for anyone, given
the court record of the Kitzmiller case, to argue something
like the Gill Lake position where teachers have a
constitutional right to teach bad science to their
students," Scott said.Source: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10548320/page/2/

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Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of
myths. - Karl Popper